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Chapter8.m.fatahpour.podcasting
video publishing=in elementry school kids seem to love podcasting, older kids have started gravitating to video in a big way. And the biggest reason for that without question is YouTube.com. Bought by Google back in 2006 for over a billion dollars, YouTube is already having an enormous disruptive effect on our society, and it's also becoming a place where more and more of our students go to publish the artifacts of their lives. As of this writing, over 20 hours of videos are being uploaded to YouTube every minute, which translates to almost four years' worth of video uploaded each day (tinyurl.com Jp 464gl). Staggering numbers, if you ask me. Not surprisingly, it's also a site that most schools have chosen to block. While, as with the other sites we've discussed here, the vast majority of YouTube content is appropriate, the "anyone can publish anything" aspect can be unsettling. (Still, wouldn't it be better to teach students how to deal with less-than-salient content that they see when they get home?) The same goes for Google Video and a number of the other popular uploading sites. So, a number of alternatives for educators are already springing up, the most notable of which is TeacherTube.com. TeacherTube has thousands of student and- teacher-produced videos and wants yours as well. The great part about these online services is that they're free, number one, and they are unlimited in terms of their use. And, in the case of YouTube, you can even record video right from your computer onto their server. Very cool. But as with podcasting, there is a certain amount of writing and preparation that goes into great movie making. It's digital storytelling in its most complex form, and it requires a significant amount of thinking and work to do it well. And, of course, the process is a bit more complex, making it difficult to cover in this small amount of space. My goal here is to point you in the right direction to get started. IVE STREAMING-WEB TV FOR THE ClASSROOMS The students to create their own TV shows online injust a few clicks. And, if you have a personal learning network at your disposal, you also have a potential audience at your fingertips. While this is still pretty unexplored territory in education circles, and while the tools are evolving rapidly, a surprisingly large number of teachers are already experimenting with the idea of creating live "television" with their students in their classrooms and schools. And because of how incredibly easy it is to do this, that number is increasing greatly every day. The examples run the gamut: school plays and musicals being broadcast to relatives far and wide, student science presentations for parents to watch, live student-run daily news broadcasts, live teacher professional development that anyone can tune into, conference workshops and presentations free to those who couldn't make the trip, and all sorts of other possibilities. Basically, we're close to the point where every school, every classroom, every person, in fact, can own a television station. Don't believe me? Here's a quick story. On the night of the New Hampshire primary in 2008, I got a Skypechat asking me to come watch and participate in a live review of the election returns on the "Newly Ancient" streaming TV channel at Ustream.tv. Chapter8 PODCASTING One of the first podcasts I ever remember listening to was by Matthew 'Bischoff, a teenager who had a real passion for technology and a real understanding 'of audience. It was obvious from the first few seconds of his regular\ 'Internet radio show that he was a young man who was not speaking to just his 'friends or family. He was speaking to the unknown thousands of people who 'started downloading and listening to Matthew's shows in late 2004 when podcasting 'was born. "This is Escape From the World" he would half-shout into 'the microphone, "and I'm your host Matthew Bischoff, a 1 3-year-old from 'New Jersey, podcasting from his bedroom." It was great stuff (Bischoff, 2005). 'Matthew was one of the first of what has turned into tens of thousands of 'people who have taken the easy-publishing meme of the ReadlWrite Web into 'the world of Web radio. Podcasting is the creation and distribution of amateur 'radio, plain and simple. And it's the distribution piece of this that's important, 'because although we've been able to do digital audio for some time now, getting 'a lot of people to listen to it hasn't been very easy. Now it is. Many podcasts 'are presented by nonnal, everyday people just talking about things that 'interest them-with a bit of music mixed in. Others are more serious and 'focused in content, offering up the latest interesting news on a particular topic, 'interviews with interesting people, or recordings of interesting keynotes and 'presentations. And these days, most news programs, like Meet the Press and 60 'Minutes, and many radio shows like Fresh Air from NPR are also offered up as 'podcasts so you can take them with you and listen to them whenever you like. 'In just a few short years, podcasting has become all the rage, and one of 'the reasons is that the barrier to entry is pretty low. Like the other technologies 'that I 've talked about in this book, you do not need a lot of technical 'expertise to make it work.'Here's what you need to create a basic podcast: a digital audio recorder' 'that can create an MP3 file, some space on a server to host the file, a blog, 'and something to say. That's it. That's part of why the number of new podcasts 'out there continues to explode. The other part of the quick success of 'podcasting comes from the fact that not only are they easy to create, they are 'easy to consume as well. And that's because of RSS. 'Just like it allows people to subscribe to your Weblog, RSS allows' 'people to subscribe to your podcast. And just like new blog content shows' 'up in your aggregator whenever it's posted, new podcasts show up in your 'MP3 player whenever they are created. Say, for instance, you are subscribed 'to Ben Grey's "The Ed Revolution" podcast (Theedrevolution'.com). Whenever you program it to do so, the free podcast aggregator software 'that sits on your computer will go out and check to see if Ben has a ''new show for you to listen to and, if so, will download it to your computer.